NEW YORK (June 6, 2025) —A significant milestone from last week’s Oslo Freedom Forum: The Human Rights Foundation’s (HRF) introduction of “vibe coding” to the global human rights activist community.
“Vibe coding” allows individuals without any coding experience to code. It is a paradigm-shifting technological moment where, finally, non-technical users can quickly build websites, apps, event tools, and other digital assets essential for nonprofit operations.
If you haven’t heard of vibe coding, you’re not alone — it’s a new term. It was coined by Andrej Karpathy in February. A founding member of OpenAI and former senior director of AI at Tesla, Karpathy wrote, “There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding,’ where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs . . . are getting too good.”
Today, AI-powered assistants like Replit and Goose can handle coding tasks automatically, dramatically reducing the amount of manual work needed to release a finished product. This means significant productivity boosts for anyone, and in particular, human rights defenders.
Nonprofit leaders are often burdened with time-consuming tasks such as website creation, research, maintenance, proposal writing, and event tool management.
Vibe coding simplifies these tasks, enabling anyone to, for example, create a fully functional website tailored to precise specifications in minutes instead of in hours or days in conjunction with an expensive design team.
The process is straightforward: users provide instructions by text or voice, and AI agents generate the desired outcome. At a recent HRF workshop, attendees watched as our technical lead, Justin Moon, and Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey “vibe coded” a new website for a partner organization in just eight minutes, using only voice commands. When something didn’t work, Moon and Dorsey simply asked the agent to “fix it,” and a few minutes later, the problem was addressed.
Something perhaps not fully understood by those who haven’t yet vibe coded is just how simple these tools are to use. In the Oslo workshops, we even watched a seven-year-old child with no coding experience create (and fix problems with) a website for his mother.
Open-source freedom tech protocols really stand to benefit from vibe coding. Already, developers are using AI tools to enhance Bitcoin, nostr, and ecash. Last week, a next-generation Bitcoin wallet was vibe coded in hours. Now imagine any activist group being able to spin up a Bitcoin wallet or nostr application specific to their needs in minutes. This is no longer science fiction.
Shortly before the Oslo Freedom Forum, which took place on May 26-28, Dorsey and a small team of developers vibe-coded a new application called Chorus. Chorus allows anyone to effortlessly create groups and share content and money in a censorship-resistant environment, without the need for administrative paperwork. During the Oslo Freedom Forum program, developer Alex Gleason presented MKStacks, a new tool designed specifically to help people vibe code on nostr.
We suggest you keep two things in mind as you explore the world of vibe coding and see what it can do to upgrade your organization:
- Try it yourself: The best way to understand and leverage vibe coding’s potential is to personally experiment with it. Replit, Lovable, and v0 are excellent cloud-based tools available now.
- Prioritize cloud-based AI tools: Opt for cloud-based AI software as opposed to granting an agent access to your local device so that you can be selective with the files and data that your agent sees.
While vibe coding is still an emerging technology, its trajectory is clear. It empowers activists to rapidly develop essential tools independently, significantly amplifying their impact despite limited resources. This stands to make the power of the powerless more impactful than ever before.
In the coming weeks, HRF will release video demos showing exactly how vibe coding can be applied to essential nonprofit tools. We’ll also be sharing updates about the world of vibe coding in our monthly newsletter.
Stay tuned, and feel free to share your thoughts and experiences with HRF’s AI for Individual Rights program anytime.
